


A Heap of Sun and Shadow

by PhoenixFalls



Category: Elementary (TV)
Genre: F/F, First Kiss, Friends to Lovers, POV Character of Color, POV Female Character, always-a-girl!Sherlock, retirement fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-01
Updated: 2015-01-01
Packaged: 2018-03-02 17:36:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,152
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2820551
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PhoenixFalls/pseuds/PhoenixFalls
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Twenty-five years on, Joan and Sherlock retire to upstate New York together.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Heap of Sun and Shadow

**Author's Note:**

  * For [celaenos](https://archiveofourown.org/users/celaenos/gifts).



Joan never expected to be living with Sherlock again.

They had tried twice while they were working together: at the very beginning, of course, and again after Andrew’s untimely death. Both of those experiments had ended with Joan reeling and fragile and Sherlock fleeing to MI6. When they started over for the third time they agreed it was best to maintain their own apartments.

But after two and a half decades as partners, seeing or speaking with each other nearly every day, the prospect of retiring and only meeting up for the occasional lunch and holidays was. . . disheartening.

So when Sherlock came to Joan, her eyes locked somewhere over Joan’s shoulder, and talked about buying a property upstate “with two bedrooms and plenty of space for the menagerie,” Joan took the implied invitation, set up a desk in the bedroom with the southern exposure, and filled the closet with her thickest jeans, her warmest sweaters, and her hiking boots.

Joan only intended for it to be a weekend retreat – she still had a life in the city after all – but slowly her weekends stretched to four days, five days, and more and more of her belongings migrated to the farmhouse.

About a year in she let her lease on the Chelsea apartment lapse. She didn’t mention it to Sherlock, but of course Sherlock knew anyway.

Joan woke her first official morning living at the farm to the weight of a tattooed arm across her waist, small breasts pressed against her back, and Sherlock’s surprisingly high-pitched snore in her ear.

They weren’t the sort of girlfriends who hugged. Joan thought she could probably, with a little work, count every single time they had touched for reasons beyond the strictly practical: the few times Sherlock had awkwardly attempted physical comfort over the years; the even fewer times Sherlock had accepted Joan’s grounding hand on her back. So this was new.

Sherlock’s arm was resting right on top of Joan’s hipbone; with past bed partners it would have been an uncomfortable arrangement, but retirement had been rather generous to Joan’s waistline, and she now had a bit of a cushion there. Joan quashed the trickle of self-consciousness she felt when she noticed Sherlock’s fingertips resting against her bellybutton, which was deeper than it used to be.

As a distraction, Joan tried to develop a bit of outrage at the invasion of her space. But her bed had been empty of any body but hers for a long time, and in the privacy of her own head she had to admit it was nice to wake up this way. To feel Sherlock’s spindly, stubbly legs twined with hers, Sherlock’s hot breath against the back of her neck. There had been a lot of water under the bridge since Sherlock was first barging into her bedroom at all hours, and Joan trusted Sherlock now, bone-deep. She found her stock of outrage was all out.

Still, her wonky shoulder was starting to complain about the extra weight, so she twisted around onto her back. Sherlock snorted a little at the jostling, then her blue eyes blinked open, slower to focus on Joan’s face than they used to be and meltingly vulnerable.

She licked her lips but didn’t pull her arm back or untangle their legs. “Ah, Watson. My apologies. I did not intend to fall asleep on you.”

Joan raised an eyebrow. “Forget falling asleep on me. What were you doing in my bed to begin with?”

“Well, ah, you see, I intended to wake you at dawn so that you might join me for a spot of birdwatching – you have become quite atrociously lazy in recent years, sleeping in ‘til all hours – but then when I entered your room you appeared to be in the grip of a pleasant dream so I determined that I could grant you fifteen more minutes to complete that sleep cycle and sat down to rest my knee while I waited and, well—“

“You fell asleep yourself.”

Sherlock’s mouth twisted up into a bashful grin, crows’ feet deepening around her eyes. “Indeed.”

Joan shifted onto her other side, so that she could face Sherlock properly. Sherlock’s hand came to rest in the hollow of her waist. “And you’re still lying in bed with me because. . .?”

Sherlock huffed, then quicker than Joan could blink she leaned in and pressed a chaste kiss to Joan’s lips.

Joan took a moment to turn the experience over in her mind, working through possible explanations. Sherlock’s eyes remained steady on hers as she did so, giving nothing away.

“You aren’t going to try and convince me you’ve been pining all this time, are you?”

Sherlock screwed up her face in disgust. “Absolutely not. Really, Watson, I’m disappointed in you.”

Joan’s stock of outrage might be all out, but Sherlock always had plenty. It made Joan smile. “So what, exactly, is happening here?”

Sherlock flopped onto her back, bringing the arm that had been at Joan’s waist up to cover her face. “We are women of the world, Watson, and while I know that you have always preferred a less forthright approach, we both have physical needs. You must have noticed that my usual outlets are unavailable to me here, so—“

Joan couldn’t help but laugh. “Are you seriously propositioning me right now?”

“You _know_ my position on the importance of regular orgasms, Watson. . .”

Joan rolled her eyes, but found herself oddly reluctant to say “no” outright.

What did saying “yes” risk, after all? After all this time, sex – good or bad or indifferent – was hardly going to be enough to break them.

Joan pushed up onto her shoulder and pulled Sherlock’s arm away from her face. Sherlock’s expression was complicated, mouth mischievous but eyes hesitant, and when Joan reached up again to brush back her wispy blonde hair Sherlock’s eyes fell closed and she leaned into the touch like a cat.

Joan felt a wave of tenderness, and on the strength of that bent down to kiss Sherlock again, deeper this time, gently teasing her lips open with the tip of her tongue. Their shared morning breath was mildly unpleasant, and Joan’s arm was trapped uncomfortably between their chests, but Joan found it shockingly easy to forget all of that and sink into the kiss, the building heat between them.

Sherlock brought a hand up to Joan’s face, cradling the back of her head for a moment, then pulling her back just enough to break contact and look in her eyes.

“So you agree, then? We will be giving this a go?”

Joan felt her heart rate kick up a bit, just as it had on that long-ago day when Sherlock first proposed taking up detecting. And just like then, the answer on her lips came not with any sort of hesitation or fear, but as a relief, a sense of things slotting into place delightfully.

“Sure.”

**Author's Note:**

> Title comes from Edgar Albert Guest's poem "Home," with the dialect altered for Sherlock's snobbishness. This fic was previously posted [here](http://holmestice.livejournal.com/322620.html) as a part of the 2014 Winter Holmestice Exchange.
> 
> Many, many thanks to [sanguinity](http://archiveofourown.org/users/sanguinity/pseuds/sanguinity), without whom this fic would not have been completed. As always, feel free to come say hi on either [LiveJournal](http://phoenixfalls.livejournal.com) or [tumblr](http://phoenixfalls.tumblr.com)!

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[podfic] A Heap of Sun and Shadow](https://archiveofourown.org/works/8941750) by [sanguinity](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sanguinity/pseuds/sanguinity)




End file.
